The Cardinal in DC, the Sister in Rome, and the Pope’s new law

Two appointments made big news out of the Vatican this week, one to the leadership of the US capital see and the other to the top spot at the Vatican department tasked with overseeing religious orders and congregations worldwide.

Robert Walker Cardinal McElroy got Washington, DC, to the surprise of many and bemusement of everyone except the most egregious papal Renfields, owing not least to the heft of the baggage he brings to the office.

McElroy is accused of sitting on information he received regarding Theodore Edgar “Uncle Ted” McCarrick, the convicted serial sex offender (and olim Archbishop of DC).

McElroy rose to prominence after being created in the 2022 consistory that also saw Vatican lifer Fernando Vergez Alzaga LC raised to the red (making Vergez the first member of the order founded by disgraced the disgraced criminal pervert, Marcial Maciel, to receive the red hat). McElroy is a “Francis bishop” in the mold of Chicago’s Blase Cardinal Cupich, and also very much Cupich’s protégé.

In 2022, it was already evident to Church watchers and Vatican insiders that Cupich—a member of the Dicastery for Bishops, the Roman curial department responsible, inter alia, for vetting prospective candidates and making recommendations to the pope regarding episcopal nominations—is a powerful man.

But power is not popularity. Cupich has never been too terribly popular among the bishops of the United States. Neither has McElroy. Popes do not often rely on popularity contests to inform their decisions in these regards.

The prevailing wisdom has it that Pope Francis wanted someone in DC willing to mix it up with the incoming Trump administration, and McElroy’s public stances on issues ranging from immigration to inclusivity in the Church and society more broadly may suggest he fits the bill.

As Charles Collins of Crux has noted, however, McElroy’s rise is ultimately tied to Francis. Francis has baggage of his own. The ascendant populists of the political right around the world are less and less likely to ignore papal or pope-adjacent baggage—skeletons, as Collins says—when the Church pushes against their agenda.

“That was easy,” McElroy told Washington’s outgoing Archbishop, Wilton Cardinal Gregory, in a moment caught on a hot mic after his meet-and-greet presser on the day of his announcement.

Expect the honeymoon to be short.

The really interesting appointment of the week—it came on the same day as the McElroy announcement, raising not a few eyebrows and forcing both scribblers and editors to make a hard choice—was of Sr. Simona Brambilla as Prefect of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.

The 59-year-old Italian religious woman has a fascinating bio and an impressive resumé. She trained and worked as a nurse before entering religious life and has continued in medical practice throughout her career. She served as a missionary in Mozambique before taking a leadership role in her congregation, the Consolata Missionaries, of which she was Superior General for some thirteen years.

Brambilla also holds the PhD in psychology from the Pontifical Gregorian University’s Institute of Psychology. Her dissertation leveraged her missionary life experience and focused on evangelization and inculturation in Mozambique. She taught at the Greg’s psych institute for several years, concurrent with her turn as her congregation’s General Councilor, during which time she completed her doctoral work.

Sr. Simona Brambilla is no slouch.

That’s one of the reasons for which Brambilla’s getting tapped for the top job at Consecrated Life is by far the more interesting of the two appointments that grabbed headlines this past week.

The prefect’s office at Consecrated Life is a cardinal’s billet, one usually filled by a cardinal archbishop. If the fellow named to the job is an archbishop but not yet a cardinal, he takes the title of pro-prefect until he gets his red hat, which will usually come in the next consistory for the creation of cardinals.

The reason for this is straightforward: Prefects need to be able to tell anyone who isn’t the pope what to do. The Church is hierarchical, whether you like it or not. A mere priest can’t tell a bishop or archbishop what to do, because a bishop does not have to obey a priest.

Sure, if the priest happens to be speaking with the authority of the pope, it may be in the bishop’s interest to obey the priest, but he would also be well within his rights to say, “If the pope wants me to do that, he can tell me himself.”

In the hifalutin’ jargon of ecclesiology and sacramental theology, we say that bishops possess “fullness of Orders” and with it the threefold munus of teaching, sanctifying, and governing.

Basically, senior officials of the Roman Curia have been high-ranking members of the Church’s governing hierarchy as a practical matter of orderly administration. It is why secretaries of dicasteries—or at least secretaries of what used to be called Congregations, i.e. curial departments with governing power rather than—who are the fellows who usually do things, have usually been archbishops.

Under Francis, however, a new theory of governing power has come into vogue.

“The power of governance in the Church doesn’t come from the sacrament of Holy Orders,” then-Fr. Gianfranco Ghirlanda SJ (now a cardinal) told reporters gathered for the 2022 roll-out of Pope Francis’s new fundamental law for the Roman Curia, Praedicate Evangelium, “but from the canonical mission,” i.e. from the pope.

“Whoever is in charge of a dicastery or other organism of the Curia does not have authority because of the hierarchical rank with which he is invested,” Ghirlanda also told reporters in 2022, “but because of the power he receives from the Roman pontiff and exercises in his name.”

He or she, it turns out.

Suffice it to say that’s not how the majority of folks have understood the business for most of the Church’s history.

In broad strokes, the trouble with Ghirlanda’s theory is not in what it affirms. That the Roman Curia governs in the pope’s name is axiomatic. The problem is in what it denies, i.e., that those who exercise governing power in the pope’s name need not possess the governing authority of the Church conferred in the Sacrament of Holy Orders.

Until now, Ghirlanda’s has been little more than a theory. There is a layman in charge of the Vatican’s comms dicastery, but that outfit’s powers and mission profile are peculiar and circumscribed. Pope Francis has appointed women—including Brambilla—as secretaries to several dicasteries.

Now, however, Pope Francis is really putting his theory to the test.

Vatican watchers, legal scholars, and theologians have wondered whether the next pope might not decide that every one of Sr. Brandmilla’s acts taken on her own authority should be null and void, simply because she neither possesses nor participates in the governing munus of the Church.

In any case, Pope Francis has given a fairly strong indication he is not convinced his theory has legs. Alongside Sr. Brambilla, Pope Francis has named the 65-year-old Angel Cardinal Fernandez Artime SDB as pro-prefect.

A pro-prefect has the same canonical authority as a prefect, which means—on paper, at least—that the dicastery has two heads. If official decisions and other acts of governance appear with Brandmilla’s signature and the countersignature of the pro-prefect, who is an archbishop (and a cardinal), then the unholy mess and tangle of such an eventuality will be avoided. Even if Brandmilla has no authority to govern, Fernandez does.

On a purely practical level, having both a prefect and a pro-prefect is an even better recipe for dysfunction than having a cardinal in a subordinate office within a dicastery headed by another cardinal, as happened when Pope Francis raised then-Fr. Michael Czerny SJ of the Section for Migrants and Refugees in the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development when that dicastery was under Peter Cardinal Turkson. (Czerny now runs that dicastery, and Francis has given the red hat to Czerny’s successor on the Migrants and Refugees desk, Fabio Baggio CS.)

There is a sense in which none of this really matters at all, except insofar as it serves as further evidence—were any needed—of Francis’s penchant for personal rule and preference for ruling by papal fiat. None of the dicasteries of the Roman Curia have any real governing authority of their own anymore, anyway.

The only thing apparent from this latest development is that Francis has hedged his bet. The appointment of a pro-Prefect (a red hat, no less) suggests not even Francis fully believes his pet theory.